Friday, May 15, 2009

Dan would have had an Orgasm and then Cried Himself to Sleep

The special treat in Studio AMD's presentation this week at Providence Geeks was the demo of their in-house presentation software.

Let's say you're planning a mega-skyscraper in Dubai, or perhaps a redesign of Seoul's waterfront. You pay a top-tier star architect to design the buildings, they hand off the plans to Studio AMD, who for, say, $150,000 turn those plans into some gorgeous illustrations and animations. Then your $500,000,000 plan hinges on how well you present those images in your pitch. You might decide that it is worth using something a little more polished than PowerPoint. That's where Studio AMD's in-house presentation tool, which they call simply "ebook" comes in.

There is not a heck of a lot to say about it, because it doesn't have a lot of features, it just looks supremely smooth, clear and refined, particularly in its integration of scrollable images and video. It is written in Flash; early versions used an attractive book metaphor rather than a slideshow; it seems designed to work equally well as a group presentation tool or like a portfolio to be viewed directly on a computer or kiosk. It apparently allows some editing by clients, but definitely has a "we're going to strictly limit how much you can screw this up" ethos.

It also struck me as the closest thing I've seen to what Dan wants for creating visually compelling math challenges. Of course, normally, civilians can't even see it -- it isn't on the web -- let alone use it. That extra bit of presentation polish isn't exactly something you want to share with the people coming before and after you in front of the sheik. They said it took about 10 months to write. This is the kind of thing somebody ought to be able to squeeze out of that $50,000,000 MacArthur is sinking into Digital Media and Learning.

1 comment:

Dan Meyer said...

How very graphic.